Toni Morrison

1. Toni Morrison

2. Born Chloe Anthony Wofford, February 18, 1931, in Lorain, OH • Married Harold Morrison, 1958 (divorced, 1964). She has two children: Harold Ford and Slade Kevin • Education:Howard University, B.A., 1953; Cornell University, M.A., 1955

3. Morrison’s Career • After working as a housemaid and her college years, Morrison became an Instructor in English at Texas Southern University, Houston, TX (1955-57) and then moved to Howard University 1957-64. • Senior Editor: Random House, New York, NY, senior editor, 1965-85 • Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 • Since the publication of The Bluest Eye, Morrison has held professorships and lecturer positions at SUNY, Princeton, Yale, Bard, Cambridge, and Harvard.

4. Morrison’s Works Fiction: The Bluest Eye, Holt (New York, NY), 1969, reprinted, Plume (New York, NY), 1994. Sula, Knopf (New York, NY), 1973. Song of Solomon, Knopf (New York, NY), 1977. Tar Baby, Knopf (New York, NY), 1981. “Recitatif” appears in Confirmation: Anthology of African American Women Writers. Ed. Amiri and Amina Baraka. New York: Morrow, 1983. Dreaming Emmett (play), first produced in Albany, NY, January 4, 1986. Beloved, Knopf (New York, NY), 1987. Jazz, Knopf (New York, NY), 1992. Paradise, Knopf (New York, NY), 1998. Love, Knopf (New York, NY), 2003. A Mercy-- 2008 Non-Fiction:  Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1992. Morrison has also edited a number of books, some of which include:  Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality, and (With Claudia Brodsky Lacour) Birth of a Nation'Hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O. J. Simpson Case, Pantheon (New York, NY), 1997.

5. On Recitatif Neither blackness nor 'people of color' stimulates me in notions of excessive, limitless love, or routine dread. I cannot rely on these metaphorical shortcuts because I am a black writer struggling with and through a language that can powerfully evoke and enforce signs of racial superiority, cultural hegemony, and dismissive "othering" of people and language which are by no means marginal or already and completely known and knowable in my work. My vulnerability would lie in romanticizing blackness rather than demonizing it; villifying whiteness rather than reifying it. The kind of work I have always wanted to do requires me to learn how to maneuver ways to free up the language from its sometimes sinister, frequently lazy, almost always predictable employment of racially informed and determined chains. (The only short story I have ever written, "Recitatif," was an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial). --Playing in the Dark